Canalys beancounters have warned that the big cloud players need to sort out their trust issues with the channel.

The big cloud providers need the channel to help widen sales but need to be straighter with the channel and build trust if they are going to deepen the relationship throughout what is set to be a year of growth, Canalys said.

AWS continued to hold its position as the dominant cloud service provider in Q4, but Azure is taking more share as it looks to mount a challenge to its rival.

Shred-it and the LMC Buying Group are helping GP surgeries and dental practices securely destroy sensitive patient and staff information

The medical sector which holds shedloads of confidential data, from patient and medical records to staff data, all of which is of considerable value to malicious third-parties.

Data protection has become a top priority in the medical sector of late, especially since the implementation of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Through its partnership with the LMC Buying Group, a federation with over 6,500 members that negotiates discounts on a wide range of products and services for healthcare providers, Shred-it has helped the industry improve data protection measures and therefore their GDPR compliance plans.

ADVA is telling its partners that it has expanded its Ensemble Harmony Ecosystem to provide more software, hardware and deployment location solutions.

The network functions virtualisation (NFV) partner programme now includes more than 50 members and encompasses over 100 components.

The latest additions range from commercial virtual network functions (VNFs), to open source VNFs, to white box or commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers. With new partners, including integrators and resellers, collaborating to deliver product to communication service providers (CSPs), the expanded ecosystem offers more choice of components.

Extreme Networks announced the general availability of Extreme Networks’ Defender for IoT which helps organisations secure unsecured IoT devices.

Defender for IoT can be deployed on any network and designed to allow non-technical staff at schools, hospitals, retailers and hospitality venues can use it to isolate and protect both wired and wireless IoT devices from cyber attacks.

IoT devices present two major security flaws for businesses today. Most lack embedded security—they were built to run on private networks where the assumption was it was tightly controlled, and device-level security wasn’t required. Manufacturers never considered that the private enterprise network could be connected to the public internet, and therefore the devices may run out-of-date operating systems, have hardcoded passwords and/or lack anti-virus and firewall capabilities. And they are typically deployed in a flat or unsegmented network so that if breached, the attacker can gain access to sensitive areas of the network.

David Raftery, Chief Revenue Officer, Integration Partners said that customers across the industry were having difficulty with IoT security and one of the most challenging aspects is the creation of security policies for a diverse range of devices.

“This can be time-consuming and fraught with error. Extreme’s Defender for IoT solution automates this task with its ability to learn a device’s typical behaviour and then build a security policy that restricts its communication to only what is authorised. With the ability to then segment IoT devices into secure tunnels, Extreme provides our customers multi-layered IoT security over whatever network they have deployed today. It’s a unique and a compelling solution”, he said.

Mike Leibovitz, Senior Director of Product Management and Strategy, Extreme Networks said that businesses are extracting so much value from the IoT revolution that it’s easy to see why deployments are happening fast, and security should not be viewed as an impediment to that.

A third of SMEs are looking to establish operations overseas to make sure they can avoid the worst consequences of a hard Brexit.

Beancounters working at the Institute of Directors (IoD) have worked out that 29 percent of those firms had moved operations out of the UK or were planning to do so.

Those findings come on the back of research from Agilitas IT Solutions which reported back in September that 52 percent of UK channel businesses were actively looking to expand their business internationally.

Most of the firms that the IoD spoke to were looking to open offices in the EU and there have already been moves from some in the channel to do just that, with both Softcat and Computacenter opening Dublin offices.

While the software king of the known universe, Microsoft still reigns. Its results show a double digit rise in revenue but there was some concern on Wall Street about the state of Azure.

The vendor’s share price fell more than four percent in after-hours trading, with sales slightly below expectations. Revenue for the three months ending 31 December increased 12 percent to $10.3 billion.

Microsoft did not mention its Azure revenue numbers, but offers a year-on-year growth figure. In this quarter sales rose 76 per ent, continuing a long-running trend of high double-digit growth.

But if you look at the numbers for last year this number is well behind the 98 percent growth it scored in the second quarter.

The big idea is to tackle endpoint attacks which are up up 20 percent on last year, costing businesses millions, Proper endpoint patching is seen as the first line of defence for businesses worldwide. Datto RMM 6.5 will help MSPs better address the security needs of their customers’ IT environments, the company claims.

A part of Datto Business Management, Datto RMM is a cloud remote monitoring and management solution for MSPs. It allows MSPs to manage the IT infrastructure of small and medium businesses remotely with automation tools such as network monitoring, patch management, and remote control.

Grey box shifter Dell has revealed the findings of global research into the adoption of digital transformation and found that the UK has yet to work the concept out.

According to Dell’s bi-annual Digital Transformation Index, the UK is better prepared in many other countries, but even so 71 percent of digital leaders think that digital transformation should be more widespread across their organisations.

Cisco is on the hunt for a network of certified partners that can help customers snuggle up to IoT.

Cisco is building a global force of partners that have gone through its IoT training and specialisation programmes.

The vendor wants resellers, ISVs, machine builders and service providers signed up to its IoT programme so that partners with certifications have the highest visibility across its own sales teams as well as with customers.